Stalker

While digging around in the photo folders on my computer- organizing, rearranging and moving- I found this image I captured in Austria almost two years ago while visiting our dear friends the Stockhammers. I filed this one in the Stalking the Locals folder.

While I tend to be more of a scenes and images and inanimate objects type of photographer, I love getting photos of people who don't know that I'm photographing them. Is that creepy? Well, it's what I do, and realize that it is a little stalker-like.

I love nuns. In high school we did a One Act Play, Do Black Patent Leather Shoes Really Reflect Up? and I played a nameless nun, you know, like Sister #2. I had so few lines there was no need to even name the character that I was portraying. This was the year before I was given no part at all, but the role of lighting or stage manager or something that I did not want, so I quite before the first rehearsal. I was a Senior and I was not going to being pulling the curtain or striking a set for fifteen and sixteen year-olds who got all the main roles.

That's the thing with being human. I am not always in control. I can not make anyone do anything- even if it is the right thing. Even if it is just being nice or playing by the rules or following truth. It doesn't matter. AND- although me NOT getting the role I wanted has nothing to do with absolute truth or rule following- it was not what I saw as fair so I bowed out and blamed it on a terrible director, a ruined love affair between two teachers, and the fact that the Drama teacher's daughter and all her friends were Sophomores, therefore they got cast in all the main roles.

As much as I'd like to think that I've learned something in the past thirteen years, I am not sure that I react much differently today when I don't get my way. I know that I can only control my behavior and reactions and not the mean woman behind the counter at the USPS on a Saturday morning. I can not change other peoples attitudes or perceptions or bad days, but only cling to what I know is right and true, even when giving someone a taste of their own medicine might sound more enjoyable in the moment.

I've been reading Ecclesiastes and how all things are futile, passing, here today- gone tomorrow. It can seem a bit depressing at first; a bit overwhelming and leave one feeling oppressed with indifference and grief at the fact that, "Hello! I'm not in control. As a matter of fact I'm out of control!" But the fact that we don't have to worry or stress and can give it all to God should be freeing and an enjoyable place to be in. Not scary.

I think that the idea of not being in control, not being god, not getting to persuade God into doing what we think is best worries us because it is hard to say, "I don't know." And we live in a broken world where it is really really really hard for us to wrap our minds around the fact that there is so much more to life than this little part that we can see.